The Cheiron Group
History Back in 1999, European pharmaceuticals and medical conglomerate the Cheiron Group (TCG) engaged in a highly publicized series of lawsuits directed against a number of individuals and groups -- mostly religious in nature, mostly American -- who had propagated in the media the story that the company was controlled by Satanic forces. The story had come out of TCG's logo, the head of a horned, bearded man wearing a laurel wreath and superimposed over a caduceus. Various fundamentalists in the US misinterpreted the logo's classical pagan imagery as being somehow occult, and further misinterpreted "occult" as straight Devil worship. They gladly propagated the Satanic connection, at times even encouraging people to boycott the conglomerate. Cheiron cleaned up, and one US televangelist and several small businesses ended up going bankrupt. TCG looked bit like the bad guy in some of those situations, but the company's spokespersons maintained it was necessary. Cheiron and its owned partners formed one of the foremost medical corporations in the world. Cheiron itself has been dedicated to affordable and effective medication for everything from asthma to HIV since 1904. Weide GmbH is one of the foremost producers of medical technology -- scanning equipment, radiotherapy resources, and dialysis machines, for example. Barthes Incorporated produces neurology equipment and puts millions each year into research into medical prosthesis. Jones-Klein-Beauchamp manufactures painkillers, and owns a number of well-known brands of sweets and soft drinks. The spokespersons pointed to TCG's unmatched record in the field of research, and the high effectiveness of treatments discovered by TCG's researchers. Cheiron was a fundamentally benevolent business, they said, and as such needed to protect its reputation. The ironic thing was, the fundamentalists were about half right. There really is something very fishy going on with the Cheiron Group. The central company, Cheiron Ltd, has been around for about 100 years. Company literature describes the company logo as having been designed by Cheiron's founder, Edward Barrett, in 1905. But if that's so, how come the logo appears on a sculpted medallion above the door of an 18th-century Masonic hall in London? Why does that same logo appear in a suppressed book on forbidden religions printed in Geneva in 1632? What is the logo doing engraved on the ornate helmet of a 15th-century suit of Bavarian plate armor? And, for that matter, why is it repeated perfectly as the motif on the pediment of a sunken temple off Santorini, apparently lost well over 3,000 years ago and only rediscovered in 1987? Maybe the Board of Directors knows. Not that anyone else can find out. No one knows for sure who the Directors even are. No list of their names has existed since Edward Barrett retired in 1921, and even then, he's the only Director the company has ever named. Even bearing in mind its successes in the pharmaceutical field, how on Earth does a company like Cheiron maintain such stellar stock prices without ever having a name or a face at its head? And then you have the activities of those TCG employees who aren't involved in developing, manufacturing or selling wonder drugs and dialysis machines, the ones who get paid to investigate supernatural phenomena and kidnap monsters, the ones who contain the monsters, and the ones who experiment on the creatures (using science that really shouldn't work by any normal rules). That, at least, is the one secret of TCG that the resources of its "Field Projects Division" are party to: They capture the monsters, and the monsters are turned into guinea pigs, ingredients and spare parts. And then they pick up a more-than-adequate paycheck at the end of the day. And there are other, more dubious benefits, too. In an age when most of the big companies are divesting their employees and contracting them back as temps, TCG's field resources get a job for life, whether they want it or not. Part of that is the contract. But a big part of that is the surgery. In order to make their agents more capable of facing down the creatures they have to catch for a living, TCG's staff doctors change them, replacing limbs and organs while adding others, making them, in a small part, the monsters they get paid to bring down. The man in the company car might have a suite of special organs melded with his flesh, but he knows that they are still company property. Cheiron owns him, literally, and there isn't any way he's ever leaving, even when he goes and inevitably gets himself killed -- the contract says they get to render down his body in the R&D department, too. It wasn't long until TCG began to expand to, well, other worlds, to put it simply. With the discovery of "Rifts", which was still a top-secret topic in most of the world, they began to set up shop in other universes altogether. One of these being an odd planet called "Rigel Prima" by the locals. List of Subsidiaries * Barthese Incorporated (Medical Research Supplier) * Jaun-Klein-Beauchamp (JKB) (Manufacturing) * Keystone Pharmaceuticals (Prescription Drugs) * The Pleseus Guild (Thaumatech/Biotech) * Weide GmbH (Medical Technology) The Enemy If anyone challenges a field resource working for Cheiron, she's likely to mention "Directive 53." She's talking about Safety Phrase 53 in an old EEC Council Directive (67/548/EEC). Put simply, it instructs companies to avoid exposure of the public to dangerous substances and to obtain special instructions before using them. The European Economic Community has been defunct for years, replaced by the European Union, but still, TCG claims Directive 53 as its mandate. It's one of the first sections in the Field Projects Division Handbook, a slim, plain brown paperback that serves as the bible for Cheiron's field resources. The handbook purports to be a comprehensive guide to procedure and a brief encyclopedia of Potential Assets (which is TCG jargon for "any supernatural creature we can catch and make use of in the lab"). The parts about procedure are pretty limited in use. The parts about the monsters are all but useless: Vampires, it says, drink blood and are vulnerable to sunlight. Werewolves suffer an extreme allergy to silver, it says, and goes on to say that TCG doesn't issue silver bullets. The handbooks have no corporate insignia, no names of authors, no ISBN numbers. It has the FPD's own logo on the front (a stylization of Cheiron the hunter's bow and arrow). At no point is the company mentioned by name. It's always just "the Company." Every so often, one gets out into the public sphere without any real effect. They're completely deniable. Even so, Cheiron agents do try their best to keep them out of the wrong hands (read: Anyone else's), and kill to get them back. Not that the handbook is all that useful. Cheiron is a massive conglomerate, with vast resources, but for all that, it's no more efficient than any other mega-corporation. Following the handbook is a good way to be killed, or worse, and quickly. Some of Cheiron's more jaded members have suggested -- anonymously -- that it's not that TCG is clueless. They say it's that TCG, for reasons never adequately explained, sees fit to deliberately supply its field resources with inadequate and inaccurate information. The good news is that while the agents are probably better off not reading the handbook (but they had better not throw it away -- it's still company property), they do get almost free rein as to where they go and what they do, as long as they fulfill their quota of Potential Assets found and retrieved by the company. TCG has a number of Dedicated Pickup Teams for this very purpose, all on call for when field resources have neutralized and secured Potential Assets. They make a point of not picking up still-dangerous hostiles, however, and field resources who think that Dedicated Pickup Teams are for getting them out of messes are in for a shock. Given that most DPTs comprise three guys and a van or helicopter, that makes a sort of sense. Whether or not the capture of a Potential Asset works toward a field resource's quota really depends on whether or not TCG's R&D division considers it worth studying. They have plenty of vampires and werewolves in containment, in various degrees of health, and if they want another one, they'll ask for it. On the other hand, agents who send in something R&D has never seen before are in for a pretty big bonus. When it comes to the competition (read: Other hunters), field resources soon learn to make compromises and deals. Having said that, more often than not, TCG field operatives have no choice but to use whatever help they can get, while at the same time denying their colleagues the kill. If they don't make their quotas, it's not just their jobs on the line. Of course, no one told them that when they signed the contract. Field Projects Divisions TCG is vast, but within the Field Projects Division, resources join one of the four main sub-divisions: Field Research: Field Research resources are basically spies. TCG is highly interested in those conspiracies whose members have access to unusual powers or equipment, and often sends agents to seek them out, assist them on hunts and, if they can, poach everything they can from them when the time is right. Recruitment: Field resources working for Recruitment look for other hunters to hire, and the best way to do that is to observe them hunting. TCG has a terrifying attrition rate, and often loses more hunters than it hires. Retrieval: Retrieval agents make up most of the Field Projects Division. They're the ones who go out and hunt monsters, truss them up and call in the DPTs. Extermination: A fairly new division in the TCG, Exterminators, or as they are affectionately called by co-workers, "The Cleanup Crew", specialize in exterminating that which is no longer needed by the company. After research material is in surplus, and not much more can be gained from more, an Exterminator is sent in to destroy the nonhuman target in an effort to protect any human populations from them. Members Tsuchimikado Yuuka: Chief ExterminatorCategory:Lore Category:Organizations